re: #152 Cineaste

I think these are completely opposite view points. The person who says we can do whatever we want is saying we have no affect on the world around us. The person who says we can harm nature is saying that we can affect the world around us.

I think the issue is that ‘we’ as man look at things in the context that we can understand…a blip on the Natural timeline…2000 years…maybe 10-20,000 if you want to push it back…

That doesn’t even get ‘us’ through one Ice-age cycle…which IS a natural event.

We look at things that change in the short term and use those changes to then extrapolate and conjecture as to what is going to happen in the long term.

In the LONG term, nature will always re-balance the world, based on the status-quo of the time. Sure, we set off all the nukes in the world and that hoses up the planet for a few hundred, maybe even a 1000 years…again, just a blip in the NATURAL timeline…just as we humans are just a blip…look at how long dinosaurs were around…millions of years…

I see the point Cliffster is getting at, and I tend to agree. I used this argument during an undergrad class a few years ago and the prof. did not have a good alternative arguement at the time…

GG